The Bone Garden

William P. Wood

Description

THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

She looked like everyone’s grandmother: white-haired, plump, bespectacled, and kindly. Only Dorothea Montalvo Puente’s eyes, black and hard behind her glasses, hinted at the evil that lurked within. She was the rarest of murderers, a female serial killer—probably the most cold-blooded ever recorded in the annals of crime.

This shocking story of the gruesome murder of seven men for profit comes from bestselling author William P.  Wood, the Deputy D.A. who had earlier prosecuted Puente for drugging and robbing elderly people. He knew intimately the malice that coursed through her veins, and thought he had seen the last of this callous and calculating woman. But her chameleon-like deviousness helped her reappear as a sweet, benevolent landlord—and later allowed her to escape police custody as they stood in her yard surrounded by the gaping graves. The Bone Garden chronicles the discoveries that ignited a media firestorm and transfixed a nation, putting an entirely new face on evil in this country.

Sujets

• Criminals
• Biography
• William P. Wood
• Outlaws
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 12 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781620455234
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for THE BONE GARDEN
" The Bone Garden is one of the most gripping and insightful true crime sagas of the decade."
-Steve Martini, New York Times bestselling author
"William P. Wood writes with the authenticity of an insider and the sensitivity of a thinking man."
-Darcy O'Brien, bestselling author of Two of a Kind: The Hillside Strangler Case
Praise for WILLIAM P. WOOD
"No one writes a better police procedural than Bill Wood."
-John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author of The Thirteenth Juror and The Hunt Club
"Wood knows the intricacies and ironies of the legal system. He also knows how to employ them to weave a compelling story, convincingly plotted and crisply told."
- San Diego Union
"Wood clearly knows the inner workings of the judicial system."
- Publishers Weekly
"William P. Wood, a former prosecutor, knows well how to surprise and engross us."
-Vincent Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter
"A natural storyteller!"
-Norman Katkov, author of Blood and Orchids
"What Joseph Wambaugh did for law enforcement, William P. Wood will do for the judiciary."
- Tulsa World
ALSO BY WILLIAM P. WOOD
Sudden Impact
Gangland
Broken Trust
Pressure Point
The Bribe
Stay of Execution
Rampage
Quicksand
Fugitive City
THE BONE GARDEN
The Chilling True Story of a Female Serial Killer
WILLIAM P. WOOD
TURNER -->
Turner Publishing Company 424 Church Street Suite 2240 Nashville, Tennessee 37219 445 Park Avenue 9th Floor New York, New York 10022 www.turnerpublishing.com

The Bone Garden: The Chilling True Story of a Female Serial Killer Copyright 1994, 2014 by William P. Wood All rights reserved. This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design: Maxwell Roth Book design: Glen Edelstein

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wood, William P. The bone garden / William P. Wood. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62045-522-7 (paperback) 1. Puente, Dorothea. 2. Women serial murderers--California--Sacramento. 3. Serial murder investigation--California--Sacramento. 4. Murder--California--Sacramento. I. Title. HV6534.S16W66 2014 364.152'32092--dc23 [B] 2014019192 eISBN 978-1-62045-523-4

Printed in the United States of America
14 15 16 17 18 19 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Old cases sometimes come back at you.
Anyone who has been in criminal law has had it happen to them. The unexpected phone call. The fugitive arrested in a border city. The jail escapee caught during a robbery. The witness found dead.
Then the cops or the DA or a defense lawyer want to talk to you about something you did or didn't do years before.
The material contained in this book comes from police reports, evidence adduced at trial and at pretrial hearings, and conversations I had with various individuals connected to the case. Although this book is a factual account of a true story, certain events and dialogue have been reconstructed based on these sources.
When I left the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office in California after five years in 1982, I hoped I had heard the last of Dorothea Montalvo Puente. I had just sent her to prison for five years for robbing and drugging elderly people. I was appalled at the coldblooded way this sweet-looking, grandmotherly woman had deceived six victims and nearly killed another.
Then a family came forward and told me she had murdered their mother.
I thought I might hear about Dorothea Puente again.
It was November 1988 when I picked up a newspaper, read my own name, and saw that a body had been dug up in a yard downtown.
Then I saw the landlady's name. I was sick at heart. It was six years later, and eight more people had died. Nothing had been done to stop Puente. When she got out of prison on my cases, she had started killing again.
And I remembered the first victim, because I had never stopped thinking about her.
Her name was Ruth Munroe.
T H E B O N E G A R D E N
P R O L O G U E

APRIL 27, 1982

The woman lay on her side in the upstairs bedroom. She wore a pink nightgown. It was night outside and the lights were on in the room. The woman's eyes were open and she was trying to move.
Ruth Munroe had struggled to turn over, raise her hand, open her mouth to scream ever since she heard the voices downstairs. But she couldn't move at all. She could only stare at the wall.
She strained to hear who was downstairs. Sometimes her daughter Rosemary, Rosie she called her, came to visit. But for the last few nights it had been her son Bill, stopping by 1426 F Street after work to see how she was.
Ruth fought frantically to say something Bill would hear. Her mouth wouldn't open.
She had been drugged. She knew that. She had been working in a pharmacy at Gemco for ten years. She knew drugs and how they worked. This paralysis was unnatural. Someone had put something in her food.
Inwardly Munroe cringed. For the last three days she hadn't eaten any solid food. All she had had were cr me de menthe cocktails mixed by Dorothea. It will soothe you, Dorothea had said softly, it will make you feel better.
Ruth tried to cry out and failed again. She recognized Dorothea's voice and now she heard Bill's, too. He had come to see her, to make sure she was, as she had heard Dorothea tell him, getting better.
There's nothing wrong with me, she wanted to shout. She and Dorothea lived alone in the house. Ruth cursed herself as she lay paralyzed. She had moved in with Dorothea only a few weeks earlier. They had planned to go into business together, catering parties. It was something to fill Ruth's retirement.
She tried to talk. She had to talk, to get help from Bill.
She had her family to live for, grandchildren she loved. She didn't want to die.
The bedroom door opened. Ruth heard only one person come in. It was not Dorothea. Ruth knew those deliberate footsteps.
Bill sat down on the bed. He leaned over and spoke to her.
"How are you, Mom?" he asked quietly.
Ruth tried to say something, anything.
Bill stroked her shoulder. "Everything's going to be okay. You're going to get better. Believe me."
Ruth twisted and writhed futilely inside her mind.
Bill was nearer. She could see his worried face, the dark brown hair, mustache. He said comfortingly, "Dorothea's going to look after you."
He kissed her. Ruth felt a tear roll down her cheek, from her open right eye. When he got up and left, she lay still on the bed, the tears dropping slowly.
Ruth must have slept or lost consciousness. Time passed. When she opened her eyes again, she was still on her side. The bedroom was dark, though, and the street outside utterly quiet. It felt like it was deep in the night or early morning.
Then the bedroom door opened. Ruth tried to squeeze against the wall, away from Dorothea who came resolutely to the bed, sat down, and with strong, determined hands, turned her on her back.
Dorothea was saying something. In the half-light from the hallway, her white hair was stark, her glasses dark, and Ruth realized Dorothea was swearing obscenely.
Roughly, Dorothea pulled Ruth's head up with one hand.
Ruth quavered. In her other hand, Dorothea was forcing a glass of sweet-tasting, minty liquid down Ruth's throat.
P A R T 1
That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, "Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
-T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land -->
1

On Saturday morning, November 12, 1988, the crowd started gathering early across the street from the gray-blue ginger-bread Victorian house at 1426 F Street in downtown Sacramento, California.
The crowd was larger than the day before, when it had first formed, drawn by the news that a body had been found in the backyard of the house. From across the street, held back by police barricades, the crowd could see that the two-story house was already festively decorated for Christmas and Thanksgiving.
On the dim, wet morning, the police floodlights were finally turned off after illuminating the house and yard all night. The police guard remained stoically in front of the brick and wrought-iron fence that framed the yard of 1426 F Street. More Sacramento city police officers, more diggers, more trucks, more coroner's deputies would be arriving soon.
And the crowd-restless, chattering, some holding umbrellas or pieces of plastic over their heads in the light rain-hoped to glimpse a shrouded shape or body bag being lugged from the backyard. All of the crowd-men, women, the crying or laughing children-wanted also to see the woman who ran 1426 F Street as a board-and-care home for the sick, drunk, and crazy.
Many people in the crowd knew about Dorothea Puente. Some had lived briefly at 1426 F Street, then left or been thrown out. They moved among the crowd, spreading tales of the tyrannical woman. She alternately cared for them and terrorized them. The former tenants and people who had heard other, more terrible rumors, all shivered with loathing and anticipation. For a long time many of them had believed people were dying strangely behind the gray walls, the high windows, the wrought-iron fence at 1426 F Street.
Every so often, Puente peered down from a second-story window at the crowd and the TV news trucks wedged tightly into the street.
By 8:00 A.M. the police had returned in force. They planned to dig up the entire L-shaped yard that ran from the driveway of 1426 F Street, around the house in a narrow course to the right, and ended against the next-door neighbor's wooden fence.
The long police barricades kept the growing crowd, somewhere near three hundred, across the street. The whole block of F Street was close